If you are a runner, you’ll love this book. If not, you won’t.

The Purple Runner was written in 1983 and is based in Hampstead Heath, London. The story tracks an overlapping set of runners that include an arrogant American lawyer who is bored of his life, a kiwi racer who is trying to get her act together and run at her potential, an American who is suffering from some strange illness as he searches for peace and accomplishment, and the Purple Runner who no one knows much about, but turns in incredible training runs while avoiding any substantive interactions with his fellow runners.

While the running scenes and races are well written, the story is delightful. Christman’s characters are colorful (including the Purple one), complex, and interesting. The characters’ relationships with each other reinforce the story and as the book unfolds there are some interesting twists and turns.

I ran this morning, so I don’t think I’ll go again today. But – I’ll have this in my mind tomorrow morning as I churn out a 90 minute run at the Boulder Reservoir.

Jenny Lawton – owner of Just Books in Greenwich, CT – recently had the authors of The Rule of Four (Dusty Thomason and Ian Caldwell) and Codex (Lev Grossman) in her town for an author coffeehouse.

Both are great books in the style of The Da Vinci Code. I thought Rule of Four was much more fun (and accessable / contemporary) as I could identify with it more. Codex was a little harder and not as well written, but had a great techno / computer undercurrent which the nerd in me liked. I’m looking forward to the next books from these guys.

There are probably some deep sighs at Six Apart. Hopefully it stays up :).

It appears Typepad has been down for a while (since last night?). On 6/11/04, Everything Typepad! posted a “Scheduled Downtime June 12, 2004” which said the service would be down for maintenance from 12:00am to 2:00am – likely less. It’s 8:12am EST and it’s still down. Oops.

In my experience, all hosted software providers experience unexpected downtime – often early as they are ramping their service. I remember Ebay’s 12 hour outage, Critical Path’s two day outage, and a variety of hosting services taking thousands of sites off-line. You can almost see the technical people staring at the computers mumbling to themselves “Oh shit – I can’t get this back up – something’s toast and I can’t figure it out – beepers going off – panic sets in – sweat – focus – the magic reboot dance and incantation – nothing – guess I’ve got to call the boss in the middle of the night and share my stress with him”.

Hopefully the folks Six Apart / Typepad do the right thing after the successfully restore their service. IMHO, the right thing is:

1. Apologize profusely to their customers.
2. Provide one month of free service if it’s down for a substantial period of Saturday.

This would generate huge goodwill. Acknowledging a problem like this is important to building long term trust with your customers (I saw some posts on Trust yesterday, but alas, they are on Typepad hosted sites that I can’t link to right now). Typepad should be clear this is not an “entitlement” in the future, but instead should thank their earlier users with this type of acknowledgement.

This was a chewy one. I just finished

I’ve been involved in companies that develop software for 20 years and have seen numerous different approaches with a wide range of success (and failure). Last year, I invested in a company called Rally Software Development Corp.. Rally recently released their first product – Agile Solution for Software Development Management – which is the first on-demand software development management solution designed to speed delivery of customer value using iterative development processes. Rally’s products are aimed at organizations using Agile development methodologies. As a result, I decided to read a few books about Agile software development to get a deeper theoretical grounding in this area.

Cockburn’s book is a good first book for an experienced software developer or software executive who wants to learn more about Agile software development. It’s written for a more experienced audience and is a broad treatment of Agile as an approach to software development. It is not a cookbook with specific features to follow – rather it is aimed at having the reader gain an understanding of Agile concepts and the develop ideas about how to apply the concepts to real world situations.

If you aren’t familiar with the Agile software development approach, it emerged from a meeting of 17 advocates of lightweight development processes that got together in Utah in early 2001 and formed the Agile Alliance. The participants represented a number of different software development methodologies (all now classified as “Agile development approaches”) including Adaptive Software Development, XP, Scrum, Crystal, Feature-Driven development, Dynamic System Development Method, and Pragmatic Programming. This group of highly experienced, extremely opinioned, and outspoken folks agreed on and issued The Agile Software Development Manifesto, which follows:

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

While this book isn’t an easy read, it’s a valuable one for anyone that is involved in the creation of software.

I got an email from a close friend last night in response to my recent post of Stratify’s press release.. His comment – which follows – struck a chord.

You’ve begun to illustrate one of the problems with blogs… now I go to your blog and half of it is stuff you’re trying to promote (e.g., your companies, WIT). So it’s already only 50% as interesting as it was when you started. Think about it — you actually are a smart guy with stuff to say, and half of what you’re doing is spam. What about people who have nothing to say but lots to sell!

While part of my goal with my blog is to keep “you” (where you = “you, the reader”) informed on stuff that I’m interested in and working on, I realize that simply reposting press releases without any insightful commentary is not necessarily useful or interesting (ok – it’s probably bordering on spam). So – I will solve this two ways. First, whenever I post something about one of my companies, I’ll make sure that I’m commenting on what I’m posting – so it’s actually “my view” of what’s going on and is relevant, rather than simply a canned press release. Second, I’ll set up a separate press release page on my web site (which is now framed within a Movable Type blog) and create an RSS feed for this page separately for anyone that wants to get these press releases.

In addition, I’m very interested in feedback like this as I continue to evolve this blog and tune it to what’s interesting to “you, the reader” (as well as what’s interesting to “me, the writer”. One of the problems with blogs is that there are no particularly good user profiling or feedback information build into the blog infrastructure yet (other than comments, which we all know are pretty lame). For now, my only real feedback mechanism is email, so please use it if you have anything to say (good, bad, or what you are interested in).

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 8, 2004– Stratify, Inc., a leader in unstructured data management for business applications, today announced the launch of Stratify Legal Discovery Service 3.0 solution for law firms and corporate legal departments. The explosion of discoverable information in legal proceedings challenges attorneys to move beyond labor-intensive search techniques that needlessly increase costs and analysis periods. With the Stratify Legal Discovery Service product attorneys can intelligently comprehend the document universe, efficiently tag, review and produce documents, and accelerate and fortify early case assessment and advanced risk analysis for their clients. Providing intelligent concept-based foldering, integrated search and filtering, and email traffic analysis, the Stratify Legal Discovery Service solution enables attorneys to develop, test and execute winning strategies faster based on an early mastery of the facts in a case.

Stratify Legal Discovery Service 3.0 delivers the most powerful end-to-end electronic discovery solution on the market for both law firms and in-house counsel. At the heart of the service is Stratify’s unique technology for electronic data discovery currently in use within the U.S. intelligence community as well as large-scale publishing and oil and gas companies. Stratify processes all data (including metadata) extracted from any supplied media, including hard-drives, backup tapes, email, CD/DVDs, and hard-copy records, creates concept-based folders uniquely representative of the specific case issues from the universe of discoverable documents and records, and then automatically sorts each document into relevant concept-based folders. These concept-based folders provide attorneys an intuitive understanding of the document universe, enabling them to immediately focus on relevant facts and expedite their analysis and case assessment.

“Stratify worked closely with AmLaw 100 firms to develop this new legal discovery service to enable litigators to better serve their clients,” said Ramana Venkata, Stratify’s President and CEO. “Our ability to quickly process massive amounts of data and automatically sort it into concept-based folders provides attorneys with a 360 degree view of complex litigation and regulatory matters, based on which they can more accurately assess the facts and develop the optimum strategy for their clients.”

Scalable in the extreme, the Stratify Legal Discovery Service product processes over 1,000,000 pages per day. Attorneys can quickly grasp the essence of a case even while their legal team continues to incrementally review and tag relevant documents. Because the concept-based folder organization efficiently culls out junk mail and irrelevant material, reviewers can immediately focus on the most relevant documents. Leveraging the concept-based folder organization of the document universe, the Stratify Legal Discovery Service solution provides a robust set of features for efficient document review and analysis, including:

– Attorneys and reviewers can search and filter the document universe using keywords and metadata including date, tags, senders and receivers to effortlessly focus their analysis on relevant documents
– Links to attachments are preserved and duplicate documents, both near and exact, are presented with every document, enabling attorneys to analyze changes and accelerate their document review
– Documents are displayed in over 225 native formats facilitating review of spreadsheet formulas, hidden columns, and document metadata
– Reviewers can efficiently tag documents from concept folders or search results, and annotate and assign them to work folders for subsequent attorney analysis
– Email traffic is analyzed for senders, receivers and custodians enabling legal teams to reconstruct communications on key issues and find critical documents

The Stratify Legal Discovery Service is an ASP (Application Service Provider) solution hosted at a secure data facility in San Jose, California. Legal teams can securely access their data over the Internet from anywhere, at anytime, as well as contact dedicated Stratify technical support personnel. Stratify supports clients through every phase of document review and analysis, assigning a personal project manager experienced in litigation support operations and a dedicated support team for each case. Stratify maintains complete audit trails and logs of all operations performed in the data center, as well as all user actions that take place within the application interface.

Stratify, Inc.

Stratify is a leader in Legal Discovery and unstructured data management software. The Stratify Legal Discovery Service is an ASP solution that combines a complete eDiscovery application with our leading-edge technology to enable attorneys to accelerate case assessment, strategy development and analysis using unparalleled analytical and discovery capabilities; litigation teams to process large volumes of discovery documents combining efficiency and quality within a complete eDiscovery workflow; and Legal IT to leverage Stratify’s secure, scalable architecture with minimal infrastructure investment. The Stratify Discovery System is a complete enterprise software platform that helps enterprises harness today’s vast amount of corporate information by automating the process of organizing, categorizing and acting on the business-critical, unstructured information that is usually found in documents, presentations and Web pages to provide them Intelligence-at-a-Glance.(TM)

Founded in September 1999, Stratify is a privately held company that has received funding from Mobius Venture Capital (formerly Softbank Venture Capital), and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. Named as one of the 100 KM Companies That Matter for the second consecutive year by KM World in 2003, Stratify is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about Stratify, please visit www.legaldiscovery.com.

——————————————————————————–
Contact:
Stratify, Inc.
David Bayer, 650-934-8539
david_bayer@stratify.com

Google just announced the 2004 winners of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scolarships. The scholarship was awarded to female undergraduate and graduate students earning computer science degrees during the 2004-05 academic year, who were selected based on academic performance, responses to essay questions, and letters of recommendation. Eight received $10,000 awards; eleven received $1,000 award.

The mission for the Anita Borg Institue for Women and Technology is to increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology, to increase the positive impact of technology on the lives of the world’s women, and to help communities, industry, education and government benefit from these increases.

I first heard about the Anita Borg Institute through my work with the National Center for Women and Information Technology. The Anita Borg Institute is one of the hubs for NCWIT which is headquartered out of the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. NCWIT is run by Lucinda Sanders – the retired CTO of Lucent Bell Labs / Avaya Labs. The NCWIT mission is similar – it is to ensure that women are fully represented in the influential world of information technology. Through a nationally connected effort of programs, networks and research, the Center will work to guarantee that women’s perspectives and skills contribute significantly to the creation and application of information technology.

I’ve been on the board of trustees for about a year, along with some other great people including Marie Alexander – CEO of Quova (one of my portfolio companies). Halley Suitt – who has a great blog called Halley’s Coment – is also involved.

Both NCWIT and the Anita Borg Institute are outstanding organizations being run by people dedicated to increasing and advancing the role of women in the field of information technology. Hats off to everyone involved, and kudos to Google for their support of these initiatives.

I’m on an airplane from Denver to Philadelphia blissfully listening to U2 on my Ipod using my new Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones.

These things are awesome. What took me so long to discover them? If you fly more than once a month, I command you to save your soul and go buy a pair now. Buy them on the Bose site and I get nothing, buy them on the Amazon site and I get enough money to buy a pizza.

I’m as happy as one can be on an airplane. United forgot my Asian Veggie meal again, but who cares – I can’t hear them because my headphones are cancelling out their noise.